"Then I think you'll find — " Colby began.
"I sat in your lobby for twenty-five minutes first," Floyd said. He said it the way he might observe that a load of joists had arrived short. Not an accusation. A measurement. "Third chair from the door. I want to tell you what I saw, because you're both men who deal in reports, and this is the only one I trust from this building so far."
He told it in order, without heat, the way he would describe a failed inspection to a crew whose work he respected. The roofer with the paycheck folded in his back pocket, and the library's computers. The woman with the letter and the child, and the team she could reach by telephone. The nineteen-year-old with the scholarship application in a plastic sleeve, sent to a portal. The man in the cap who needed a notary, sent across town. The suit with the leather case, coffee and a banker, door still swinging. He did not name Dani. He said the young woman at the door, the way you'd say the saw at the yard, as a function that somebody had set up to work the way it was working.
"She offered me the kiosk," he said. "Then she offered me North Side, where they have more tellers. Then she offered to book me a banker on Thursday, in case I turned out to be a person." He folded his hands on the bonded folder without opening it. "She was polite the whole time. I want that in the record too. She was polite, and quick, and she was doing exactly what she'd been taught to do, I could hear the teaching in it, the way you can hear the school in a kid's piano playing. So I'm not here to talk about the young woman. I'm here to ask about the teaching."
Colby had the expression of a man who has stepped off a curb he believed was solid. "Mr. Briggs, if there was any failure of hospitality at the door today, I take full — "
"There's a question I actually came with," Floyd said. "The facility can wait ten minutes for it. If your door sorts people by their coats, what does the rest of the building do with their money?" He let the question sit. The rain ticked at the glass. On the wall, the new yard gleamed in its impossible spring. "I started here with a check in my shirt pocket I was afraid would bounce. Dolly counted my cash twice and didn't let me feel the size of that fear. If I'd come in today as that man, your branch would have sent me to a machine that can't open an account for a fellow without the right phone, or across town to a branch with more tellers, as if tellers were weather. So when you tell me this facility reflects the depth of the relationship, I have to ask which relationship you mean. The one with me now, or the one you'd have offered me then, at the door, based on my boots?"
Ostrander had gone quiet in the manner of a man doing ethics in real time. Dolly wrote something on her notepad in her clear hand and then, unusually, did not show it to anyone.
Colby recovered the way he had been trained to recover, with process. There would be a review. There would be coaching, refreshed. The branch's service standards were, he wanted to assure Mr. Briggs, fully aligned with the bank's published values, and any deviation —
"I'm going to stop you," Floyd said, not unkindly, "because I can feel a speech coming, and I've heard the speech, I gave the speech, back when my yards were smaller and my apologies were bigger. Here's where we are." He opened the bonded folder at last, took out the bank's own term sheet, and turned it over, and on the blank back, in a carpenter's pencil he produced from his jacket pocket, he wrote five lines in block capitals, slowly, while two bankers and one reference section watched the pencil move.
He slid the page across. Ostrander read it first, and his eyebrows went up, and he passed it to Colby without comment, which was its own comment.